Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars by Jay Wexler

Hosted by Barnes & Noble at Boston University

Jay Wexler, a School of Law professor of law and a humor writer, reads from his new book, Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars. After spending six months visiting the schools, towns, and landmarks that shaped important Supreme Court decisions on religious freedom, he says, “I’ve written what I like to call the first-ever First Amendment memoir-travelogue-comedy.”

Wexler reads from a chapter on prayer in schools, imagining a dialogue between feuding Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy about the constitutionality of a Rhode Island school’s graduation prayer and recounting his trip to a football-crazed East Texas high school whose traditional pregame “invocation” caused controversy.

In the question-and-answer period following his reading, he delves deeper into some of his trips, including a visit to an animal-sacrificing Santería cult in Florida and an Amish community in Wisconsin. He explains the importance of church-state debate, especially in schools, “the battlegrounds where we fight over how we’re going to transmit values to the next generation.” It’s precisely because people take the issue so seriously, Wexler says, that he wrote his book from a humorous perspective: “I wanted to make the point that it’s possible to talk about these issues without losing our temper.”

September 29, 2009, 7 p.m.
Barnes & Noble at BU

Video length is 00:48:08.

About the speaker:
Jay Wexler, a School of Law professor of law, teaches law and religion, administrative law, and environmental and natural resources law. In 2008, he taught at the Edouard Lambert Institute of Comparative Law in Lyon, France, and at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, as a Fulbright Scholar. Prior to joining the LAW faculty in 2001, he served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and to Judge David Tatel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and worked in the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. He is a graduate of Harvard University, the University of Chicago Divinity School, and Stanford Law School. An oil painter and writer in his spare time, Wexler is a regular contributor to McSweeney’s and other literary publications. Holy Hullabaloos is his first book.

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